


[S] Game Over: Showtime

by tBrilli4ntD4rkness



Category: Homestuck
Genre: #JusticeforHal, Alternate [S] Game Over, Ashen-Pale Vacillation, Both in the literal sense here and a canon sense because seriously, Canonical Character Death, Dissociation, Doomed Moirails, Dream Bubbles (Homestuck), GAME OVER Timeline (Homestuck), Gen, Grieving, Hal and Dirk are moirails, Hal is a sprite, Implied/Referenced Character Death, John and Terezi are in the beginnings of their kismessissitude, Justice for Hal, Minor Kismesissitude, More yelling than I've written consecutively in anything yet, Not Hal and Dirk, Or really not having time to grieve and catching glimpses on the fly, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, With a body of his own
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-22
Updated: 2020-12-22
Packaged: 2021-03-11 01:28:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,293
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28146852
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tBrilli4ntD4rkness/pseuds/tBrilli4ntD4rkness
Summary: "It's time to make astatement; I pity the city is ruined 'cause we could havefooledSkaia's game just the two of us, but--Aranea has just made a fool of us."It was a terrible kind of irony. There had been twelve players, eight of them godtier, with a collection of sprites, a benevolent god of death off in the works, and the alien that had been in contact with the alpha team session. And yet, Aranea, the god dogs, and the Batterwitch had destroyed them.Not to mention Lord English was still out there, somewhere.Or: In an alternate doomed version of pre-retcon events, five players have a discussion. Acceptance and deception ensue.
Relationships: Auto-Responder | Lil Hal & Dirk Strider, Auto-Responder | Lil Hal & Roxy Lalonde, Background John Egbert/Terezi Pyrope - Relationship, Rose Lalonde & Roxy Lalonde
Kudos: 2





	[S] Game Over: Showtime

**Author's Note:**

> There's a [John-Terezi animatic](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_6FMOlRrSQ) for this song. For some reason it was the movements of a [Hollow Knight one](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjUUsy8Pih0) that initially gave me the idea, though.
> 
> This is set in an alternate ending to [S] Game Over. Hal(sprite) was never fused with Equius, is a sprite of his own. Rose isn't fatally wounded by HIC, or at least not imminently fatal; Dirk came early/in time and took her place.  
> Hal has some unresolved blame and is dealing with several stages of grief at once, and figures that (even though one more person managed to survive, it can't be won with only the five of them) the retcon will happen anyway, thus he will try to take whatever revenge he pleases. And Rose is left behind in a doomed timeline once again. Sorry, Rose.

Everything was blurred in a distant sort of way, from the twin points of pain resonating in his chest to the flickering neon lights at the edges of his vision. He didn't remember anything like them around when he'd been barreling towards the fish witch, and they were too small and multicolored to be a memory of her psionics bearing down on him afterward. He wasn't quite sure who he was, to be honest, and he couldn't remember whether that was familiar or something to be concerned about or both. Either way it wasn't as unsettling as the grainy material digging into his clothing or the circle of faces for which he wracked his brain, unable to place.

Relief ran through him as the wide-eyed, shocked face of his sister knelt beside him, but his attention was quickly turned to the phosphorescent creature behind her. As his eyes traced up its white-red body, he was reminded of looking in a mirror, knowing he should recognize the face there and yet only able to tell that the reflection belonged to him by the way it obediently mimicked his own movements with instantaneous precision.

The sprite made a sound that he didn't recognize but knew must have been his name - or whatever combination of noises he'd claimed as his, certainly not a Name if he barely responded to it now. The thought shivered at the back of his mind, _I know you_. He felt his lips moving and a hum in his chest that made his seeping wound ache more, but could not tell what he'd said if at all.

He could see the movement of eyes, visible behind bright red shades from the way the sprite's body glowed, and the curving shape of tear tracks below them. He hadn't ever seen him cry before - for now he was sure that they'd known each other quite a while, even if exact events were beyond his recollection at the moment - and what a strange thought it was to attach to those sparkling drops of ectoplasmic liquid leaking past the triangular mask. What the hell was he supposed to do to fix this; what had he done to begin with? There was too much that had happened to keep straight.

Something ancient and incredibly tired rang within him. It was no more than a feeling that could not plead its own cause, much less demand his submission, but he attended it anyway. For an endless moment, he felt himself suspended on the edge of nothing; choices lay before him invisible and inconsequential as he floated in existential stasis.

For something he'd actively rebelled against all of his limited instinctual memory, it was a surprisingly simple task to never choose.

* * *

It was a terrible kind of irony. They'd had twelve players, eight of them godtier, with a collection of sprites, a benevolent god of death off in the works, and the alien that had been in contact with the alpha team session. And yet, Aranea, the god dogs, and the Batterwitch had been too much for them. Not to mention Lord English was still out there somewhere, along with whatever remained of the other sprites.

After everything that had happened, Roxy's planet with its far away and ever present, effervescent lighting was too quiet. Growing up centuries after an apocalypse, destined to fight in a war across planets - at least before a certain obvious divergence in self -, desolation had never meant peace to Hal. Somehow, the scant few people standing around in the sands of a neon desert only made the universe feel like that much more of an empty, unknowably vast foe. Maybe it was the fact that some of their bodies had already been swallowed by the swirling array of dissolving pixels they'd left behind, or because Hal was more used to being entirely alone aside from the presence of someone on the other side of a video screen that he hadn't been able to stand for years. Maybe it was simpler than that - these people standing around weren't _his_ people, most of them, and were no better than strangers. (No "batter" than strangers - he'd have to remember that one for Jane.)

Also, again, all of his people minus one were dead.

The exception stood a little off to his side, letting her ecto-mother-daughter lean on her and retain some semblance of her dignity despite her wound. At the moment, everyone was taking a five-turned-fifteen minute breather to try and parse their emotions enough to focus. It was whatever. Fifteen minutes weren't much in the grand scheme of things either way, in sorting through recent trauma or in coming up with a plan for however the hell they were supposed to salvage the rapidly unraveling fabric of pseudoreality.

It did mean that currently everyone else was too busy in their own heads or occasional mumbled phrases to bother Hal with their strangerness or otherwise interrupt his brooding as he stared at the closed eyed figure of the person that, for a very long time, he had loathed more than anyone else in all of existence. Himself. Or at least, his completely idiotic, thoroughly aggravating, stupidly self-sacrificial, hopelessly repressed human alternate self.

Dirk had always been a mess. And now he was dead.

Back when the two of them had first diverged due to proto-Dirk-Hal's terrible decision making and bored, uncontained genius (because no thirteen year old was ever going to fess up to being morally responsible for the act of creating a self-aware digital entity and immediately telling it to live in a box), and even in the period of time in which they were still essentially the same person but with two minds in different planes of existence, there had always been discord. Which wasn't inherently surprising in and of itself, because if there was one universal constant of Dirks, it was that they absolutely could not stand themselves. The real oddity had been that the longer Dirk and Hal existed separately from each other, the more that discord had floundered its way into a functioning relationship instead of the mutiny and homisuicidal mayhem that logically should have followed.

Sure, there was a grudging respect borne of too-intimate comprehension, but there was a difference between looking back on a past project and saying, "Damn, past me actually had some brain cells," with a hint of surprised pride (because underneath every Strider's superiority complex lay their crippling fears of inadequacy), and actively admitting to someone-who-was-now-more-than-a-little-different-than-you that they did, in fact, have a handle on the facts behind what was spewing across their screen. Not that Hal had personally had this problem, of course; Dirk was human and inherently fallible in everything he did.

(Sometimes, though, on the lonely nights or days when all four humans' sleep cycles coaligned and the mysterious double Us were unresponsive, Hal had found himself wis-- no, _wondering_ whether he could sleep to pass the hours as the meatsacks did without throwing himself into a coma by hitting the power switch.)

It didn't feel real, or at least as 'real' as paradox space usually was, to see Dirk lying there, too still. Or perhaps that was the wrong description based on typical human standards; Dirk was usually more still than would be expected of a biological organism, but it was nearly on the verge of _wrong_ to see his form battered and crumpled with all of its snark bled away. It was probably as close to understanding the human phenomenon of uncanny valley as Hal would ever get - not that he would have much of a future to do so, at this rate. The percentages were so low, they were hardly worth the nanoseconds in calculating.

Hal had read up on the stages of grief, much as he had read up on everything he could sink his digital feelers into, and he knew what this was the start of, if he let it be. It was terribly unironic of him, certainly, to miss someone he had argued with on a bidaily basis so palpably, so soon. But he had meant what he said the day Dirk almost chose to kill him instead of throwing him into the kernalsprite: perhaps irony did not have any real value in any situation. He also knew what a troll would have prescribed his feelings, if they'd known to look beyond the casual level of acerbic exchanges (though he had heard, overheard, something similar about two of the bluebloods who came across to this session (like most everyone else, only one of which was currently standing nearby arguing with Jake and Jane's ectobiological young grandfather, bleeding teal along her scarf)). Somehow he thought that it would not be as odd to a troll to be pale for one's splinterself (whether or not they had evolved differently), as much as it would be how much they interceded for one another, like an ashen vacillation.

So here he was, in the sands of Roxy's planet, considering whether or not to mourn his alternate self.

"Ahem. Well," a smooth, quiet-but-too-loud voice interrupted his ruminations. "I believe that we should be considering the effects of certain, developments, on our proceeding gameplay."

Hal had a sudden and illogical rash of dislike for Roxy's ectobiological mother, mostly centered around the way she sounded so calm if slightly more in pain than your average psychotherapist, and aided by the way her speech reflected Dirk's. Or however the passing of traits between relatives on opposite sides of a scratch worked.

"Yeah." Roxy's voice was subdued with a slight catch to it, and her gaze flicked quickly away from Hal after landing on him. "It's just us now, and all, standin' alone."

"And a universe in the process of ripping itself to pieces," the tealblooded troll supplied helpfully.

"Terezi," Jane and Jake's ecto-whatever made a sound of exasperation as the troll dragged him toward where a staggered semicircle had formed. "I'm pretty sure that's not how you're supposed to be inspiring people in tough situations."

"As there is no precedent for this situation, His Honorable Tyranny dismisses the objection with an efficient removal of the head of Mr Blueberry Breeze."

Beta Rose Lalonde's eyebrows did a strange and wonderful curlicue while their mistress looked on with a somewhat smug, somewhat impassive, and maybe even mildly offended expression. Hal wondered if he should invest in a generator powered solely by the understated weight of Strilonde facial expressions. He immediately regretted the thought when it brought to mind Dirk's unending and many incomplete roster of projects.

Still, his processing didn't get the memo and immediately churned out an approximation of Dirk's face watching Rose peoplewatch. He also wondered, in the span of half a second, whether the flavor of suppressed emotional reactions had a magnetic effect on others of its kind, whether he could use its miasma as smelling salts on Dirk's corpse, and if so, how much longer with an alive!Dirk that would buy him.

Mr Blueberry Breeze made a face that was too close an approximation of his ecto-relatives' and poked Terezi in the side of the neck. For which she, naturally slapped him without looking, or well, appearing as if she was paying much attention to where her hand went.

"Well, we have two Seers, we should be able to figure something out." Roxy's enthusiasm fell short, but it had been worth a shot.

"Right. Plus an Heir and Rogue," the blue-eyed human pointed to himself and Roxy in turn, "And, um."

"Prince," Hal supplied auto-matically. But was he really a Prince? Just because Dirk had been didn't mean their classpects were the same. Too late now.

Rose pursed her lips. She looked pained, but that could just have been the hole in her flesh taking its toll along with the recoloring of her godtier duds. "I'm afraid it's highly unlikely that victory will be ours. We've lost most of our players from _three_ sessions, we're out of options in the Time department, not least of all because finding Aradia would be our only chance at having a Time manipulator, and despite having gone through many of the Game's failsafes, have yet to prove that we can, indeed, come out victorious against our destiny-drawn foes. For example, the Condesce."

Winces were exchanged all around, excluding Hal, who as a robo-sprite and a not technically living being either way had no capacity for involuntary movements. (Dirk would have had a field day if Hal had popped out of the kernalsprite and had been unable to control his new limbs or facial twitches like a newborn. Not that Hal wouldn't have picked it up quickly enough-- and nope, that's enough of that kind of thought.)

(Really, when had Dirk _ever_ let someone spoil his ironically-perfect hair, let alone when he was stressed? There was no point in wondering if it was permanently starched or soft either - though his corpse _was_ just across the way-- gogdamn it.)

Hal was hit with another wave of guilt which threatened to show on his face. If he had been there in time to stop him like a _decent_ mo-- moron, definitely, was what he meant to say. Or if Dirk was less of an _idiot_ . . Hal wasn't quite sure whether he was being crushed under the weight of whatever this was that shouldn't be able to take up residence in his chest or absolutely furious at himself, the Batterwitch, and everyone.

Looking at Roxy's tired face and the assortment of bruises, sweat and dust that covered all of them - except for Hal on the former, and Roxy's dark outfit precluded anything showing beyond the lighter dust of her planet - it didn't seem particularly nihilist to say that defeat was looking them all in the eyes, or at least shades and scarf, and winking. A random memory of _chapfallen_ came to mind. Conflicting feelings arose at that Jakeism, because while Hal had never liked the boy, he had also died a Heroic death off Hal's screen, and it was somehow harder to loathe him when Hal knew with a certainty that he would never have to deal with him again. He did experience a comforting peak of spite considering the quiet existential crises Jake had caused with his assertations of Hal's un-being-ness, and that Roxy and Dirk had subsequently had to deal with until Dirk finally pried out the reason why Hal was more prickly than usual.

Hal forcefully shoved the thought of Dirk's exasperated but still slightly concerned tone out of his mind with a vengeance.

"I really hate to be the one to say it, but if defeat is all that's left--"

"No it isn't." Terezi spat. Hal was surprised at her vengeful tone. The humans appeared to already have abdicated, and yet there was a fire in her stance. Perhaps it was a product of their worlds, but it was certainly true that trolls didn't seem to know when to give up. Hal could work with that.

"Listen to Rose!"

For the second time only, Hal spoke up. He, too, had vengeance to extract. "This isn't finished."

Terezi's head snapped toward Hal quickly enough from where she had been leaning in to hiss at the not-Crocker that her horns knocked his glasses askew.

There was a moment before Roxy murmured a quiet, "What?"

"Everyone else may be dead, but I'm not ready to leave them there. I close my eyes and I see red, and I know you do too, Pyrope, or at least the equivalent." Dirk's body was just a shell of his Self over the next dune, the last of his lives shed and sloughed off. But there was someone who was directly responsible for it, this glitch in Hal's reality, and he could _make. her. pay_. "It was your hatefriends who were caught in her psionic beam."

"So you want to sacrifice yourself in a last ditch worthless duel of a winless session?" Terezi's tone was accusatory enough that Hal was taken aback. "That's no better than these escapists who just want reality to rearrange itself so they can give up without a trial of their consciences."

"It's more than standing around waiting for paradox space to rend itself into oblivion," Hal bit back.

Terezi scoffed, a harsh sound halfway between a cackle and a growl. "Not when there might be a way to try this again, a different way."

Rose narrowed her eyes. "You believe there to be another kind of reset, that we haven't seen and exploited yet?"

"Nothing is certain in fate. You should know that, undead Seer." There was a strange accent to the way she pronounced the last three letters of _fate_.

Reflexively, Rose raised a hand to cover the bleeding on her abdomen again, as though it would extend her life. And perhaps she would heal from this, given enough time and still enigmatic godtier abilities. Hal just wouldn't be around to see it happen, of that he was certain.

"Dirk didn't give his life for us to quit like this, either." Roxy sounded stronger, less wobbly as she said it. She might have been convincing herself, but hope was a powerful thing.

Almost a drug, and one Hal couldn't afford to be hooked on.

"He ensured that you would survive, Lalonde, and I'd like to think it was for a reason and not out a misguided sense of human genetic loyalty."

The way Terezi and Rose regarded each other reminded Hal that there had been only a handful of people on that meteor for years, and given the time and inclination, these two would have argued - debated - anything and everything. He almost would have reckoned it as a pitch possibility if the troll hadn't looked so much more ready to bite the Heir's ear off.

"So he lived a good life and he gave it to me," Rose said with a flippantness too casual to be anything but purposeful. Knowing the symptoms didn't translate to understanding the aim, as Hal had long since discovered. "And he died a Heroic death for it."

"Oh, is that right, you _know_ it's not true!" Roxy's exclamation sounded as aggrieved as Hal felt. "You didn't see Jake's dreamself showered in blood and flowers after our Jack had him killed, either, and you've clearly forgotten what it was like watching your friends die in your session. Is three years too long, Mother?"

Rose flinched as though struck, but she held herself erect. Something swirled in her irises that, if she were a Time player, Hal would have described as a ticking toward the required moment of action.

Not giving her a moment, Hal moved toward her in the serpentine way only a sprite could. "And look in our eyes: that witch still holds the power." His circuits fed him the memories of, first as his younger self and then watching Dirk: fighting off drones and keeping the machinery running, barely ahead in the constant cycle of breakdowns and salt corrosion; fishing and diving for any added sustenance he could, day in and out; breaking down when it was all too much because he was still just a child all alone in the middle of a merciless ocean, physically and temporally displaced from everyone he knew of. "After years and tears and confronting his fears, he's dead on the record with no one to hear."

(If a tree falls in a forest . .)

Hal's carefully modulated voice threatened to break at the end. Terezi's face twisted like an epiphany caught in the midst of a smoldering waste heap, and she snatched not-Crocker's arm and began to haul him off. "It's no use arguing with a distraught moirail, and there are things you need to do," she hissed loudly enough that she could have been aiming it at the Lalondes as he struggled fruitlessly against her grip.

Hal spun on Roxy before the pair were fully over the rise, a fury in his not-entirely-non-existent sprite blood. They both thought it was a Heroic suicide, but he knew whose words had really been inside Dirk's head from the moment she convinced him there was a game worth playing, and Dirk might have been a hard-hearted and occasionally manipulative ass, but he'd die for anyone who was worth half a damn to him.

Like his friend/ectosister's ectomother that he hadn't even met yet but had engaged with many theoretical discussions about.

"It's your fault as much as it is hers," he nearly snarled at Roxy, some synthesized version of a growl low in his throat. "You're the one who convinced him that this game was worth playing."

"I tried to save him! And when that failed, I held him 'till the moment he died." Liquid gathered in front of pink irises.

The first thought that came to mind was a remorseful, _crying isn't like you_ , but then visions flashed through Hal's head: desperately twisting Jake around to fulfill his promise both after and before Dirk had cut off his head for the first time, and a negligible time before, watching Dirk's impaled body drift through space. "You choked him out of his own goddamn mind."

Roxy sounded desperately confused as she said, "I-- I think we're talking about different things here."

"You promised the world to him through SBURB, that he'd have actual physically present relationships with other people, you goddamn lied!"

"It was supposed to! And even with the constant death and fear, it's better than what we had! At least we can _do_ something to fight back instead of waiting for the day our defenses fall and we can't run far enough or fast enough to escape the HIC's drones!" She took a deep, shaky breath, and pleaded, "What do you _want_ from me?"

At the same time, Rose snapped, "It's not her fault. Look outside yourself."

In the pause of heavy breathing that followed in the wake of that, Hal caught a glimpse of Terezi arguing animatedly over her shoulder. The red scarf was no longer tied around her face but waving in a nonexistent breeze. The instinctual part of Hal's spritebrain twitched.

Hal turned his attention back to the reaction of the Lalondes next to him, across from him. "No matter the price, I _am_ going to kill her."

He didn't say that he'd prefer to not be alone, because while that was somewhat true, the person he would have died for and beside couldn't have been there anyway. He didn't tell them it was a better use of their remaining time - because he could feel the way fate spun for the Seer of Mind's plans - than waiting around, but he was a manipulative sprite at Heart and he was willing to try the guilt tactic. Hal knew, as much as he loved Roxy as his sister and his friend, given the chance he'd still trade someone else to take Dirk's place, and it didn't particularly matter who.

"I won't help you take her down, or whatever you think you're going to gain from that whether or not you die from it." Roxy said, firmly setting her boundaries in the sand of her planet. "There's more important things that need to happen, other things like figuring out how we're going to salvage this session, if Terezi's deal works."

It made sense; Hal could admit that in the privacy of his own head. For once in his digitized life, however, he didn't care at all for logic and rationality. (Even, or especially, if he'd mostly held the superiority of it over Dirk's head like the worst kind of carrot wielding hypocrite. He was the worst alternate self in all the ways. It was him. But there was no time to spare processing that now; he'd heard that the dream bubbles were skull-numbingly monotonous, after all.) Right now, though, with visions of how he might have done dozens of minutiae differently running about his mind, there was just one thing that Hal wanted with his whole being. Nothing could be more important.

And since he knew, as a mostly-now game construct, that what the tealblood was facilitating would mean his actions wouldn't matter in the long run anyway, for better or for worse, he might as well take this chance. Perhaps he would be able to provide his memories of this duel as one way _not_ to take on HIC, and whichever player in whatever version of events came the closest to next winning would be able to benefit from this little endeavor.

It was clear the Seer of Light knew this as well, and was in fact playing along. Hal wondered wryly whether this meant the troll could See into her Mind and knew this, too. Seers and their stalling tactics.

"Fine!" Roxy flinched backwards. Hal had never raised his voice to her, even over text. Usually Dirk was the recipient of his rarely shown and more volatile reactions. Roxy, after all, was his best friend (even though Hal had only interacted with five people and a few robots in his life, the point still stood), different than Dirk, but still so important. And, she'd been the one to auspisticise him and Dirk into their strange moirallegiance. "Then I'll do it by myself."

"You don't need revenge, this is only going to turn into another murder for her count," Roxy tried to dissuade him.

"Oh, I know that I need it. Glad to hear you have so little faith in me." It was the wrong kind of too far, Hal knew, but, well. At some point he might have the chance and inclination to apologize to her. A time when she wouldn't try to fly after him and hold him down.

"It's not about faith, it's facts! We haven't so much as touched her in years, and you saw, _you saw_ how she culled nearly everyone herself, including Aranea, while barely bloodying her trident!"

Hal glanced toward the distantly dissolving sky. There was little reason to continue arguing along. As a sprite, he could phase, even if he wasn't faster than a godtier with his tail in the way - or wings, as the orange-green sprite's might have been. Not that it had been tested before. Hal wasn't naive enough to hope that Skaia's destruction might take the Condesce with it into floating jpeggery.

 _Use lots of assertive statements,_ a memory of Roxy's voice whispered in his head. _Lots of "I think"s and "I feel"s._

 _Well,_ Hal thought. Perhaps twice in his "life" he would.

"No, look in the mirror: you know we both fear her. We're one and the same, we're afraid to hear of her." Hal gestured at himself, "We utter her _name_ with our spirits defeated, all those years surrounded by her water." He recalled Roxy pulling the other Lalonde away, "But you let him die, you're worse than the fish witch."

"Hey," Rose interjected sharply. "I told you the ending, it was all for the best. The path demanded our sessions unite in order to have a chance. It doesn't matter what version of our selves are the ones to live after experiencing it."

"So I have you to blame for this pain in my chest?" Hal shot back.

"No!" Roxy defended her ecto-mother/daughter immediately.

"No," Rose agreed, but a moment of uncertainty flickered across her face. It was all in the cant of her eyebrows, something Hal would never have recognized had he not had countless hours of studying Dirk's face for the breaks in his control. "Well, . . yes."

Hal didn't give either of them a second to recover, driving his resolve home. "If you won't go, I will. I need to avenge the lost soul I- we killed." This damn sprite body with whatever passed as hormones directing its emotions. His processing to vocalization line was thinner than ever before, and his correction wasn't quick enough. Roxy's eyes filled with sympathy at the inadvertent admission, while Rose's lit with something like understanding.

"It's time to make a _statement_ ; I pity the city is ruined 'cause we could have _fooled_ Skaia's game just the two of us, but--" Hal broke off mid-word, forcing himself to pause and inhale a space of non-air that he didn't need. Despite the abject lack of oxygen and actionable air all around, the sound carried in an easily audible rattling gasp. "Aranea has just made a fool of us."

"You're lost." As cliché as it sounded, Hal no idea whose voice it had been, harsh in an effort to drag him back into focus, and he didn't have the inclination to rewind the last seconds of his memory to find out. He only knew it couldn't have been Terezi from where she'd fallen on her face in an outline of royal blue chalk.

Over the dune, near one of Roxy's planet's pyramids, his robotic-sprite eyeshades could make out the fading edges of Breath power. It was time to leave. Rose's little discussion had served its purpose, as had the other Seer's, evidently. The session would be rewound to a point of possible survival, or it wouldn't, and Hal was free to do as he pleased.

He nodded slightly to the beta Lalonde, in recognition of her part in this whole farce, and once to Roxy as well, because she deserved at least some semblance of a salutation.

Then he turned and propelled himself into the sky, a force that should never have allowed him to overcome gravity except that Skaia saw fit to damn the laws of physics along with everything else. He phased out as he did so, shooting up through the array of lights around Roxy's planet and off into the pixelated blankness. If voices called him back, he didn't hear them. _One._

Hal's roboheart beat steadily as he flew unaffected as it always was, and his mind was calm with the surety of his actions.

(Somewhere on the other side of the planet, the not-Crocker was on his way to do whatever needed doing to prolong their alternate-younger-selves' survival. Good for him, to be the heroic one. Hal had never had the constitution for it.) _Two._

The time between robospritebeats was, of course, negligible to a non-computational mind. Between the uranium that had been his core before and the mystic sprite liquid that passed as blood, Hal had no need of other "vital" systems. _Three._

Hal drew his sword as he came upon the wreckage and game-debris. If vengeance was what love was really for, and death all he got for feeling it, Hal would at least make his last efforts _his_ choice. Better than standing around remembering the way Dirk's blood soaked Roxy's sand and made it clump into something worse. _Four._

They'd put years to waste for all their hate, directed towards themselves and each other until the only option _out_ was _through_.

Now, if after finally reaching a modicum of peace with each other - and whatever that meant about their relationship with themselves and their splintered, shattered Hearts -, he and Dirk were to be unavenged and separated . . _Six._

. . and after three years of their mutual omnipresence, no matter how invasive and aggravating (and occasionally, very occasionally, comforting, to not be alone) . . _Seven._

If Dirk was unable to stay, with him and their friends, then Hal would join him.

Whether or not Hal succeeded now, the curtains would eventually draw on the fuchsia Empress' reign of violence and tyranny, and they would _all_ know of her fate. A flash of light on dark skin and the gleam of blurred gold caught Hal's scanners. Oh, she had his attention now.

Hal allowed himself a small smirk as he adjusted his course. _Show's 'bout to start,_ he thought at the twin streaks of navy and saffron far behind him. _Don't be late._

_Eight._

* * *

"Hey." A familiar voice drew Hal's attention away from the swirling crowd of, mostly trolls, around him that milled as far as the dream-bubble horizon.

Hal turned slowly, the odds of finding the right iteration of the right person in this crowd hardly worth calculating. Yet, he considered, regarding the twin holes torn in the maroon godtier outfit in front of him, perhaps this was close enough.

"Dirk." It took a moment too long to find his voice, keep it in the right register for an ironically casual greeting. "Quite the crowd. I'm impressed." Missing was the slight sneering tone that would usually have accompanied those words. Hal was, admittedly, a little too relieved at the moment.

One pale-blonde eyebrow twitched a minuscule amount, just enough to imply the movement without actually completing it. "Allowing you to be your own sprite seems to have a singular benefit."

There weren't many other versions of Hal running about, at least that he could see here, but it would seem that Hal was . . unique in his form. He nodded minutely to the side. "Not as much of a blunder as allowing that unholy union with an overly-muscular troll."

After some time without continued repartee, Hal twisted around to see Dirk staring off at the horizon. He was surprised by how close they stood, Dirk less than a foot away, although that might have had more to do with the shifting crowd than any change in Dirk's ideas of personal space. With the proximity, Hal realized for the first time the height difference between them. Sitting on his sprite tail, he was taller than even Roxy, and with Dirk being rather vertically challenged, this set Hal's line of sight on a level significantly above Dirk's head.

Hal allowed his form to slink down, tail compacting so it didn't trail as much behind him, until he was just slightly taller than Dirk. It was still a strange feeling, when considered with how Hal had spent most of the digitized portion of his life inside a laptop or shades that tended to be at Dirk's line of sight or lower, but it was more manageable.

And there was no reason to waste an opportunity to step on his other self's toes a little. Dirk's private reaction after finally meeting the other three humans and realizing for the first time that there was both a comparison and that he was shorter even than Jane had been _hells_ of priceless.

Dirk's blank eyes were visible from Hal's side angle - pupils missing in a way that felt _wrong_ , because aside from the holes in his clothes, there were no marks of blood or wounds to indicate death. Hal imagined they might have rolled to the side as Dirk, clearly knowing what Hal had done, muttered, "Bastard," tonelessly, the corner of his mouth twitching twice.

They stood like that for an unknowable time, watching the endless crowd slowly clump farther in the distance as other stragglers walked around them. It was almost meditative to wait by Dirk for he-knew-not-what, letting his mind glance off the activity around him and feeling that despite the circumstances of their being here, it was pleasant enough. Nearly enough, even if Hal wouldn't let himself say anything about their deaths - wouldn't have even if they were alone. Death wasn't supposed to be peaceful or comfortable, but more of a loss of time and a slow sense of fading. In the moment, Hal couldn't bring himself to mind.

An assembly of trolls ran past, only a couple of which Hal recognized, one breaking their reverie to shout, "Everyone's going to fight Lord English with Meenah! C'mon, c'mon!"

Dirk tilted his head towards Hal in acquiescence after the trolls had passed. Hal eyed the distance between where they stood and where the warfront appeared to be, based on the gathering light-cracks and walls of roiling shadows, then held his arm out as an offer to Dirk.

Dirk blinked once, still clearly visible to Hal, and bemusedly held out his own arm after only a moment. Hal slid his left arm around Dirk's back to grip his corresponding side, waited until he felt Dirk mirror with his right, and lifted him just enough so that with a flick of his sprite-tail they were zooming across the empty, cracking landscape. He felt Dirk inhale with surprise from where they gripped each other in this traveling side-hug, and smirked a little to himself that sprite powers were nearly better than flashstepping.

Hal weaved them through the crowd until they were close to the front and the propensity of drawn weapons prevented further speed. He set Dirk down, releasing him a beat too late for a proper jolting fall. Sparks from LE's blasts flickered in his vision as the crowd streamed ever forward, waves of soldiers staying out of the others' way as best they could and taking the places of those fallen before them.

He looked to Dirk, swordhand still hovering about in the air without purpose. For a single moment Hal wondered whether he might ever have touched Dirk's impossible hair had they lived, and felt again (though this time not technically his own) how the hard casing of hair product would twist apart or rinse off and leave the blonde locks soft and long. He wouldn't now, though; he already knew that about himself. Better to let some other versions of themselves have the chance to talk and realize they could maybe, just partially, express some of the pale care they felt (and did their very bests to hide) rather than waste it on those already dead and soon to de-exist themselves in Lord English's laser.

Then Dirk raised his hand, poised for a fight, and he and Hal nodded to each other in a single sharp motion, left hands ready to draw on the hilts of their katanas as they joined the fray.

**Author's Note:**

> This didn't really turn out as quite the Hal style I wanted, or even Dirk, but it is something that's been in the works for a while, lit and fig, and as a simple songfic that became blown out of proportion, I'm honestly just relieved that it's up and done.
> 
> Incase it didn't come across so well, I want to be clear that the nonverbal communication in the last section isn't due to Hal & Dirk being well-adjusted moirails. They never had the chance to get to that level of communication, so really their understanding of each other is based off of their better-than-average guesses of the other's actions and idiosyncrasies.  
> Part of Hal's tragedy is meant to be that after everything, going off to die in revenge and about to die again and for the last possible time, he's still not able to say any of this to Dirk (despite it now being quite clear to everyone else on Roxy's planet, except John of course, that Hal is very much his moirail).
> 
> Rose knew what was up the whole time, and deigned to play along with Terezi's ploy.
> 
> Also, a couple of facts:  
> Dirk is canonically a leftie.  
> Japanese swords aren't drawn from the saya until the bearer is ready to strike a blow, because drawing the sword reveals its length and therefore the range of the wielder.


End file.
